I was active at the Pendleton camp in '75. Got 5 kids from one family jobs in fast food resturants right out of the camp. Unfortunately, the Father, a Saigon Bureaucrat, took the family to Florida and they all went on welfare.
Vietnamese nail down the U.S. manicure business
Successive waves of immigrants follow family ties into the industry, keeping prices low. It all began with an American actress who wanted to help refugees.
By My-Thuan Tran
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 5, 2008
Even before Hoa Thi Le left Vietnam, she heard about California's booming nail business from her brothers and sisters. All six became manicurists after arriving in America.
So when Le came to Orange County in December, she went straight to beauty school.
"My family told me, 'Do nails. It's easy,' " said Le, 49, as she practiced brushing hot-pink polish on a woman's toenails at Advance Beauty College in Garden Grove. "So I just followed them."
These days, it's hard to meet a manicurist who isn't Vietnamese. In California, Vietnamese Americans make up an estimated 80% of nail technicians, according to the industry's trade publication. Nationwide, it's 43%.
"The Vietnamese have taken over the nail industry," said Tam Nguyen, who operates the beauty school his refugee parents started.
"They began serving a niche that wasn't served by Americans. And boom!"
They've also transformed a business that once was an indulgence for the pampered and wealthy, and turned it into an affordable American routine.
In the 1970s, manicures cost up to $60. But waves of Vietnamese manicurists, mostly refugees who happily settled for low wages, slashed prices. Now, manicures and pedicures go for as little as $15.
The nail industry has become an easy path to success for Vietnamese Americans, who discovered they needed little training and could get by with limited English. Even before they know how to apply a top coat or scrape off calluses, Vietnamese newcomers have jobs lined up at relatives' salons. Some arrive with plans to open their own shops.
Salons across the Midwest and East Coast advertise for workers in Orange County's Vietnamese-language newspapers. Cosmetology licensing tests in California and Texas are given in Vietnamese. And the industry's trade magazine has a glossy Vietnamese-language version, VietSalon.
And whether a slur or proof of acceptance, Vietnamese Americans have earned a classic American distinction: becoming a stereotype. In stand-up comedy or prime-time TV, the spoof of a manicurist trying to tack on extra services in broken English is nearly universal.
Unlike the boutiques selling ao dai tunics or the pho restaurants that line Vietnamese enclaves, nail salons didn't spring from centuries-old customs. There are no precise words in Vietnamese for "manicurist." They call it tho nail -- nail worker.
How it began
The story of how the Vietnamese fell into the nail industry is one of pure chance -- of how 20 women who fled their war-torn country happened to meet a Hollywood starlet with beautiful nails.
The women were former teachers, business owners and government officials who came to America in 1975 after the fall of Saigon and landed in a tent city for Vietnamese refugees near Sacramento called Hope Village.
Actress Tippi Hedren, drawn to the plight of Vietnamese refugees, visited every few days. The Vietnamese knew little of Hollywood, so Hedren showed them Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" and pointed out her face on the screen.
Hedren was captivated by the refugees' stories of their homeland. They were, among other things, fascinated by her nails -- long, oval, the color of coral.
"I noticed that these women were very good with their hands," said Hedren, now 78. "I thought, why couldn't they learn how to do nails?"
So Hedren flew in her manicurist once a week to teach the women how to trim cuticles, remove calluses and perform nail wraps. She persuaded a nearby beauty school to teach the women and helped them find jobs.
Thuan Le, a high school teacher in Vietnam, passed her nail licensing exam four months after coming to Hope Village.
"Any profession that was taught to us, we would learn it," Le said. "We had no idea if it was going to be successful or not."
Hedren helped Le find a job at a salon in Santa Monica. It wasn't easy work. Le did not have clients, manicures were not yet in vogue, and the tools of the trade were hard to find. She scoured hardware stores for very fine sandpaper to use in place of a buffer.
Seeing Le's success, one of her high school friends from Vietnam decided to get into the business. Within a few years, Kien Nguyen and her husband, Diem, opened one of the first beauty salons run by Vietnamese Americans.
Diem Nguyen, a former South Vietnamese navy commander, enrolled in beauty school himself and encouraged friends to get into the nail business. By 1987, the Nguyens had opened Advance Beauty College in Little Saigon, translating classes into Vietnamese.
Such success stories spread to thousands of Vietnamese refugees who came to the United States, hoping to rebuild their lives. Today, Vietnamese entrepreneurs have found whopping success in the nail business, such as the Happy Nail chain that is a staple in malls across Southern California, with more than 40 stores.
Similar chains run by Vietnamese Americans popped up in the Midwest and East Coast.
But other Vietnamese salons that tried to compete with higher-end shops flopped because of limited English skills and poor business acumen. It led salons to cut prices and offer bare-bones services -- the so-called Vietnamese discount salon, where manicures were as cheap as $10.
The work can be grueling and unpleasant. The pay varies tremendously and is not always good. And for high-aspiring Vietnamese, it is a humble career.
"Of course, it is hard work," said a 35-year-old manicurist as she filed a woman's toenails at a posh Costa Mesa salon. The worker, who did not want to be named, left Vietnam 10 years ago and had to find work quickly to support two young children.
"If things were different, I could have gone to school and done something else," she conceded.
Vietnamese salons also battle the reputation of being unsanitary and offering shoddy services. A handful of Vietnamese salons have been hit with health complaints resulting from clients' contracting bacterial infections from dirty foot spas, but the numbers are no higher than non-ethnic salons, according to the California Board of Barbering and Cosmetology.
The Vietnamese nail shops have also fueled resentment from high-end salons. "Some nail technicians feel they can't compete with Vietnamese salons," said Hannah Lee, editor of Nails Magazine. "There is a point where the prices are too low and nail technicians are not making what their services are worth."
Keeping control
Like the Vietnamese, other immigrant groups have cornered business niches: Cambodians with doughnut shops, Koreans with dry cleaners, Indians with motels.
But some fade as the second generation abandons the industries their parents fought to gain a foothold in.
Nail industry observers see the opposite happening for Vietnamese Americans. Immigrants from Vietnam continue to dribble in, providing a flow of workers for new salons. And there are still unsaturated markets in the country.
"If you want to make money, get out of California," Tam Nguyen tells his students.
He said there was room for salons to transform into trendier beauty shops -- with facials, massages, leather chairs, fancy decor -- such as those that have popped up across California in recent years. They are run mostly by second-generation Vietnamese Americans.
Vietnamese Americans are also making inroads into the beauty product, manufacturing, design and foot spa business.
"Every spa chair, every nail tip, every color polish, the Vietnamese are starting to dominate," Nguyen said. "We own it, we use it."
As for Hoa Thi Le, she passed her licensing exam in Vietnamese and is looking for a manicurist job. She knows the hours will be long, the pay average. But as a newcomer who speaks only a few phrases of English, she smiles at the opportunities the nail industry has given her. And she dreams of starting a salon with her siblings.
my-thuan.tran@latimes.com
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The Nail File
The economic meaning of manicures
Virginia Postrel | October 1997 Print Edition
Remember the Great Depression of 1995? The New York Times consumed a zillion column inches--the most since the Pentagon Papers--chronicling economic disaster and "unrelenting angst." The Downsizing of America, the book version of that seven-part series, declared America a Dickensian hell, analogous to "when the peasants in England were shunted off the land and left to toil in misery in the slums." Pat Buchanan and Jeremy Rifkin shattered Crossfire's left-right conventions, agreeing that technology was destroying the job hopes of everyone but a few elitist nerds. Once the presidential campaign kicked in, political reporters couldn't get enough of Buchanan's populist economic platform. They knew it would sell--until voters humiliatingly shunned it in Arizona and South Carolina.
The voters knew something reporters missed: America was a land not of misery but of economic vitality and resilience. That's easy to see now, amid low unemployment and steady, noninflationary growth. But there was no recession two years ago. Why did so many pundits and reporters go so wrong? What blinds so many smart people to what's happening all around them?
One answer is psychological bias: "The economy" is too big and complicated to comprehend, so we overemphasize "typical" jobs and industries--the ones we see on TV. If those jobs change, or those industries shrink, we mistake turbulence for doom. And even in relatively good times, we can't imagine how the economy can possibly create enough openings to absorb future workers. "Not everyone can be a computer programmer" is the rallying cry of the gloom mongers. It's a good slogan, because programming has come to symbolize the job of the future and because, in fact, not everyone can be a programmer. An economy of high-tech knowledge workers will leave a lot of people behind.
But with all due respect to Silicon Valley, one of my favorite places, that's not all there is to the U.S. economy. So I would like to add another California-based growth industry to our set of touchstones, one that captures most major trends in American economic life: nail salons.
Twenty years ago, manicurists mostly worked in obscure corners of hair salons or catered to the wealthy. Cher got her nails done; the rest of us did not. Today, free-standing nail salons dot the commercial blocks and strip malls of cities from Southern California to South Carolina. Nails magazine pegs the market at $6 billion in 1996 for salon services alone, up from $5.2 billion a year earlier. About 239,000 people work as "licensed nail technicians." (By way of comparison, the Business Software Alliance counts about three times as many people employed in the software industry.)
That's the industry hidden in plain sight. There's also the business you don't see as you walk down the street: the manufacturers and distributors that supply the salons. Nailpro, another trade magazine, lists nearly 400 manufacturers in its 1997 Gold Book directory. These companies make everything from polishes, nippers, and acrylic nail-sculpting compounds to manicure tables, polish racks, and toeless pedicure socks. Says Nailpro Executive Editor Linda Lewis, with little exaggeration, "Everything you see in that Gold Book was developed over the last 20 years." Nail salons aren't the biggest business in America, but they're a growth industry that sprang up without much notice.
The first lesson they teach is: Take government statistics with a shaker of salt. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will tell you that "manicurist" is a fast-growing profession--impressively so for a job the BLS didn't even track in 1979. It claims there are 35,000 manicurists, a number it projects will grow to 55,000 by 2005. Now this is a business that supports three trade magazines, including Saigon Nails in Vietnamese; Nails alone has a circulation of 55,000. It is also a licensed occupation in all but a few states, and the licensing boards track active nail techs, which is where that 239,000 figure comes from. The BLS head counters have misplaced an awesome number of jobs. If they can be that wrong about licensed manicurists, imagine what they can do with gardeners, car washers, or nonunion construction workers.
Second, serendipity and synthesis drive economic development, making new industries hard to predict. Easily used acrylic systems made stand-alone nail salons possible: Occasional manicures can't support a separate business, but acrylic nails cost more and require routine maintenance. (The appeal of acrylics is that they repair bitten nails and deter nail biting, make nails smooth and even, and hold polish better than natural nails. And for those inclined to the dragon lady look, they can also be very, very long.) Artificial nails account for two-thirds of salon revenue.
Modern acrylics were invented not by a cosmetics company but by a dentist with a knack for chemistry. Catching a familiar smell as Dr. Stuart Nordstrom made her a temporary crown, a patient griped about the similar compounds she used as a manicurist to fashion fingernails.
An inventive fellow, Nordstrom fooled around in his garage lab and came up with better compounds, founding Creative Nail Design Systems in 1978. Its products and training courses, along with other innovators' improved glues and plastic nail tips, helped propel the industry's growth.
Better acrylics were necessary to build the nail business, but they were not sufficient to make it explode. That took the phenomenon veteran nail techs hate most--discount salons. The business is easy to get into: A license typically takes no more than 400 hours of schooling, and opening a shop requires just a few thousand dollars. Fierce competition was inevitable.
It came in the 1980s, as Southern California's large community of Vietnamese immigrants discovered the business. From 1984 to 1989, the number of licensed nail techs in Los Angeles County jumped from 9,755 to 15,238, about 80 percent of whom were Vietnamese-born. Over the next decade, their salons spread from California across the country. The new entries, says Nails Editor Cyndy Drummey, "made the prices much, much cheaper and made what used to be luxuries more-affordable luxuries....It's like the electronics industry." The discount salons developed techniques for getting the job done much more quickly, though less luxuriously and with minimal chit-chat. They treated manicures more as a product--nice nails--than as a pampering service. That tradeoff was fine for the new clientele of busy, price-conscious women. The market boomed.
In the story of nail salon competition, we can see many economic trends, both contemporary and timeless: Immigrants expand markets, rather than just taking existing jobs. Competition pushes prices down and spurs productivity-increasing innovation. It also encourages a backlash from old-timers; veteran nail techs like to insinuate, with minimal evidence, that the discount salons are unsanitary and dangerous, and they have pushed for increased licensing requirements and more-intrusive government oversight.
Nail salons also shed light on one of the biggest economic questions of the day: Where are the productivity gains going? "The productivity paradox" usually concerns information technology: Companies invest in computers, but productivity increases don't show up in their profits. Are the computers really bad investments? In a given case, maybe, but it's hard to imagine that all U.S. business is so stupid.
Nail salons suggest an answer: Because of competition, the benefits of increased productivity are going to consumers, not producers. By wielding an electric-powered file effectively, a discount nail tech can file, fill, and polish acrylic nails in 30 minutes, charging $13. A traditionalist filing by hand will take twice as long and charge at least twice as much. The revenue per employee per hour is about the same and may even be higher for the less-capital-intensive salon. All the gains from investing in and learning to use the power file go to the customer, who saves both time and money. That savings creates the mass market on which discount salons rely. But competition among the discounters also drives prices to the lowest sustainable level; any salon that tries to raise its fees to capture some of the productivity returns will find a shop across the street stealing all its customers. (Traditional salons can avoid this price spiral only if they distinguish theirs as a premium service, emphasizing luxury and relaxation.)
The same thing happens when companies in other competitive industries install computer systems to improve customer service. If competition means they can't charge more for the improved service, there is no gain in "productivity" as normally measured. The customer captures, in better service, the return on investment; the investing company simply keeps up with its competitors and gets to stay in business. (These untabulated increases in quality also distort measurements of inflation and, as a result, of real income. See "Priced to Move," February 1997.)
Nail salons create hundred of thousands of fairly pleasant jobs at decent wages--including tips, the average nail tech makes around $475 for a 35-hour week--without requiring lots of education or "knowledge worker" skills. Their suppliers are innovation-driven, competing fiercely to develop better, cheaper products. They even use high-tech materials. Yet when economists, politicians, or commentators get together to spout off on the economy or the future of work, no one ever talks about nail salons--or anything else like them. This is not a random distortion. It, too, has a lot to teach about both economic trends and economic discourse.
Nail salons are girl stuff. Most of the people who work in them are women, as are almost all their customers. Though women make up 45 percent of the labor force, our political discussions do not consider feminine occupations--however pleasant, well paid, or open to minimally educated people--viable alternatives to factory work. These assumptions aren't conscious or malicious; they are simply the result of distorted mental pictures.
But even female policy wonks who get their nails done every week would never think of talking about nail salons--or the multibillion-dollar beauty industry--in public. Such businesses are too embarrassing to mention. This error is far more pernicious: If we ignore all the businesses that provide beauty, entertainment, or other "nonessential," nonmaterial goods, we will miss the future of the economy. Serious discussions of economic trends are no place for fun-hating, beauty-scorning Puritans. When Jeremy Rifkin concludes The End of Work by calling for punitive taxes on the booming entertainment business, he looks ridiculous. Having discovered a frivolous industry that is actually creating a lot of jobs, he demands that we crush it. He isn't interested in jobs; he's just intolerant of change. And he confuses his personal tastes with economic reality.
Human beings of all incomes and levels of technology crave beauty and diversion. But as people get richer, they can afford to spend more on such luxuries. By historical standards, Americans are very rich. It's not surprising, then, to find smart entrepreneurs creating economic value, and lots of new jobs, by catering to our happiness as well as our physical needs. To find them, however, you have to look. Try the Yellow Pages, under "manicures.
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